REVIEWS

To publish an edited collection some nine years after its initial appearance would appear at first to be a very risky venture. If we are talking on the edge in the sense of being somehow marginally placed, neither here nor there, a becoming space or a having been point, how can this delicate un-balance be maintained for nearly a decade? Surely we all know the story: what was once radical is now commonplace, the edginess of say, 1968, was soon overtaken by suits and corporate culture; similarly, the early claims for women’s intellectual space on campus and in the curriculum have by now become mainstreamed, haven’t they? Well, perhaps not. The book concerns the experience of Women’s Studies on American campuses where, as Wallach Scott notes in the introduction, after considerable institutional successes the area has begun to lose its critical purchase. Current students are more likely to reject feminism as irrelevant and activism as no longer central to Women’s Studies programs. These issues are not, of course, peculiar to the American university scene. The blossoming of Women’s Studies courses in Australian universities appeared to peak in terms of numbers of students, range of subjects and academic jobs some time between 1987 and 1997, whereas what we have seen since has been an uneven decline across all three dimensions. Hence the timeliness for us of this book with its tough questions about Whither Women’s Studies? The essays presented in this collection have a timelessness in that their different standpoints, albeit located at particular temporal moments, derive from ontological and epistemological debates whose relevance appears as pertinent today as when they first appeared, arguably more so. The challenge set out by Wendy Brown in the first chapter is a fierce one as she puts the case for the impossibility of Women’s Studies in so far as there is a consistent lack of consensus about what it means in practice. Based on an identity politics rather than a discipline or genre of inquiry, Women’s Studies, according to Brown, is doomed to an incoherent circularity. The diverse voices that are found in Women’s Studies departments are described by Brown as coming from ‘strange routes’ (echoes of Billie Holiday and ‘Strange Fruit’?) which, rather than discovering a strength across disciplines, lead to an array of positions and positionality that work against coherence. Perhaps most crucially Brown sees a disjunction between teaching Women’s Studies and doing feminist work. And yet she rates, possibly nostalgically, the development of the field as constituting ‘one of the most vibrant and exciting contributions to the American academy in the 1970s and 1980s’ (36). Weigman’s essay takes a different position in that she points to the ‘refusal of women as a foundational referent that gives to feminism the internal critique necessary to rethink its own historical emergence within forms of liberal governmentality’ (40). Like Brown, she notes the disparity between feminism’s academic success and its loss of ‘real’ world revolutionary political power. Weigman sees politics and the academy as fundamentally opposed and describes academic theory as having

To publish an edited collection some nine years after its initial appearance would appear at first to be a very risky venture. If we are talking on the edge in the sense of being somehow marginally placed, neither here nor there, a becoming space or a having been point, how can this delicate un-balance be maintained for nearly a decade? Surely we all know the story: what was once radical is now commonplace, the edginess of say, 1968, was soon overtaken by suits and corporate culture; similarly, the early claims for women's intellectual space on campus and in the curriculum have by now become mainstreamed, haven't they? Well, perhaps not.
The book concerns the experience of Women's Studies on American campuses where, as Wallach Scott notes in the introduction, after considerable institutional successes the area has begun to lose its critical purchase. Current students are more likely to reject feminism as irrelevant and activism as no longer central to Women's Studies programs. These issues are not, of course, peculiar to the American university scene. The blossoming of Women's Studies courses in Australian universities appeared to peak in terms of numbers of students, range of subjects and academic jobs some time between 1987 and 1997, whereas what we have seen since has been an uneven decline across all three dimensions. Hence the timeliness for us of this book with its tough questions about Whither Women's Studies?
The essays presented in this collection have a timelessness in that their different standpoints, albeit located at particular temporal moments, derive from ontological and epistemological debates whose relevance appears as pertinent today as when they first appeared, arguably more so. The challenge set out by Wendy Brown in the first chapter is a fierce one as she puts the case for the impossibility of Women's Studies in so far as there is a consistent lack of consensus about what it means in practice. Based on an identity politics rather than a discipline or genre of inquiry, Women's Studies, according to Brown, is doomed to an incoherent circularity. The diverse voices that are found in Women's Studies departments are described by Brown as coming from 'strange routes' (echoes of Billie Holiday and 'Strange Fruit'?) which, rather than discovering a strength across disciplines, lead to an array of positions and positionality that work against coherence. Perhaps most crucially Brown sees a disjunction between teaching Women's Studies and doing feminist work. And yet she rates, possibly nostalgically, the development of the field as constituting 'one of the most vibrant and exciting contributions to the American academy in the 1970s and 1980s' (36). Weigman's essay takes a different position in that she points to the 'refusal of women as a foundational referent that gives to feminism the internal critique necessary to rethink its own historical emergence within forms of liberal governmentality' (40). Like Brown, she notes the disparity between feminism's academic success and its loss of 'real' world revolutionary political power. Weigman sees politics and the academy as fundamentally opposed and describes academic theory as having domesticated the feminist enterprise. Institutional power is thus identified as a key problem for academic feminism. Hence she urges a 'desire to un-belong to the reproductive mechanics' (62) and ends by echoing Brown's call for the need to 'engage deeply with what it means to be where we think we are' (63).
The second section, Edging Out, takes up the large questions outlined above by situating them at particular tipping points. For Najmabadi it was a peculiar invitation which invited her to speak from an ascribed position that caused discomfort. Authenticity, she says, is a problem in Women's Studies. As an Iranian woman, potentially describable as a secular Muslim feminist, she cannot represent all Muslims, nor is her lived experience one of living in a postcolonial society. In her view she speaks from a 'doubly contaminated zone' regarding colonisation and religion. She writes of the 'unavailable intersections' of religion and power and must reject the offers of inclusivity based on (mis)recognition as victim as she seeks the unboundedness of intellectual space. Mahmood's essay, in which she describes feminism as potentially a handmaiden to empire, comprises a powerful corollary to the previous chapter. Her evidence is drawn from the recent successes of Muslim women's novels based on the anti-women abuses of Islamic culture. These 'authentic' Muslim voices have marshalled support for the anti-Islam sentiments in the West, where popular positions on Islam are premised on liberal and neo-colonial ideology. For this reader, Mahmood's position vividly recalled one discussion group at the 2006 Canberra Deliberative Poll on Islam in Australia wherein two elderly Anglo-centric Australian men sought to inform the young well-educated young Muslim woman in the group that her culture and religion were fundamentally anti-woman. Her objections and efforts to account for her chosen adoption of the headscarf fell on deaf ears*the men knew better. The third contribution in this section is from Salamon whose account of transgender experience also reflects the power plays of bounded intellectual space. For example, Salamon shows how in popular culture lesbian is rendered more acceptable than transgender, thus revealing the ways in which dominant conservative thinking deploys the old divide-and-conquer imperative.
In the third section, Edging In, the entry from Rooney comprises an elegantly developed refusal of the theory/practice split in her articulation of feminism as a network of feminist practices. From this position, the teaching of Women's Studies becomes a feminist practice which aims to critique and de-stabilise the production of knowledges in accepted discipline-bounded spaces. The blending of race and Women's Studies issues in the paper from Guy-Sheftall adds to this position and then to the claim that, while Women's Studies is institutionally fragile, it does incorporate and energise Gender Studies and Queer Studies. From the standpoint of students of colour, Guy-Sheftall claims the power of Women's Studies to radicalise and develop counter ways of seeing the world, with all the energy and excitement of its original proponents. The last piece in the collection, from Biddy Martin, comprises a forceful argument for the continuation of the work of Women's Studies for its capacity to change the way we think the world into being. Martin identifies and condemns the 'privilege of un-knowing' which 'continues to protect those who single mindedly pursue only their own career interest' (171). She celebrates Readings' account of the university as a space for a 'structurally incomplete practice of thought' and applies this idea to Women's Studies to urge a notion of never ending quest and process rather than an established set of knowledge and way of being.
And so the collection as a whole is more disparate than conclusive and I am sure that is by intent. It succeeds in positioning the reader on the edge. Powerful arguments are presented that disturb the more sanguine among us about the various ways in which the official scholarly domains have attempted to facilitate a more inclusive practice. Mainstreaming, an increasingly accepted element in Western feminism, is rendered newly suspicious by this writing. Nor are we to be content with a standard approach to Women's Studies as though there were an accepted set of readings and knowledge products through which students were to be led. Our job as feminist educators is to unsettle existing categories, to re-energise critique and to offer a range of revitalised feminist standpoints.
But what of Women's Studies as an academic discipline? I note that among the 10 contributors to this volume only two are listed or list themselves as working in Women's Studies. Most come from humanities disciplines*history, language, literature*or political or social science. This range lends an edge to their position-taking and their critiques. One reviewer in Feminist Review said they were 'too educated and revered to be truly edgy' (Freeman 2008), thereby echoing the central concern of many of the contributors: has their success in institutionalised university dulled their potential for feminist critique? Certainly, the majority deploy a disciplined mode of inquiry to the questions they raise and all of them take a reflexive stance about Women's Studies and their diverse contributions to its logic of practice. The somewhat amorphous, uneven and risky area of Women's Studies is the stronger for this contribution. Overall then, nearly 10 years on, this risky re-publication has served a purpose. It recalls for some of us the vitality, energy and hope which attended the early days of women's studies on campus while at the same time delivering careful and considered cautions about the need to remain alert to and perhaps a little outside the disciplined enclave of accepted university strongholds. In the fragile economically riven global environment of the first decade of the twenty-first century there has never been so clear a need to revitalise the unbounded intellectual space of the idealised university in order for us to rethink the world anew. Women's Studies in its many forms should continue to prove invaluable in this task. Early on in this 'anti-anthology', feminist geographer Geraldine Pratt (54) refers to Adrienne Rich. It was Rich who, speaking from outside the socio-spatial disciplines, provided one of the earliest recorded observations on how gender and geography are mutually constituted. This 'politics of location' (Rich 1986, 210) points to some of the innumerable ways in which space and place are gendered and, simultaneously, how gender is spatial and placed/situated/situational, and how this determines the types of bodies that are permitted, assumed or welcomed in certain types of spaces. The politics of location affects all kinds of spaces, the physical and material, the metaphorical and abstract, the spaces of power and knowledge. It is from within this very broad project that feminist geographies (and feminist geographers) have situated themselves, as illustrated by this edited collection.

REFERENCE
Accordingly, and as is appropriate for a reader on geographical feminism/s, Feminisms in Geography provides a number of different routes into some of the many feminisms in and of geography. Editors Moss and Falconer Al-Hindi ask readers to travel the standard paths through feminist geography, through the inclusion of reprinted articles by well-known feminist geographers. They also provide alternative routes with the provision of three tables of contents and articles written in German and in Hindustani, both without English translation. Some newer and relatively untrodden paths are highlighted. The collection includes both new articles by recent graduates and early career researchers, as well as reprints of earlier works for which authors have provided their more recent reflections. As such, this collection can be seen as a useful theoretical, epistemological, ontological and, indeed, very personal, map of feminist geographies and geographers. For the novice or non-geographer, this compilation also provides some broad insight into human geography as a discipline based on human relationships with place, space, spatiality, location and environment.
Split into three parts, part one is an exploration of the women and feminism/s in geography and provides a broad overview of the emergence of a 'feminist geography' that challenged the gender inequalities in knowledge creation and in the theory and empirics of the geographical field. The articles included in this section are both examples of, and provide ample reference to, the key texts that have shaped feminist geographies.
Of particular interest to feminists currently working in the socio-spatial disciplines will be this section's provision of replies and recent reflections on some key feminist geographical texts, including Janice Monk and Susan Hanson's 'On Not Excluding Half of the Human in Human Geography', first published in 1982. This influential article addressed a 'general' geographical audience and called attention to the gender biases in geographical research and the implications of those biases for the purpose of geographical research. This will be of interest to novice feminist researchers and also to those who are keeping tabs on how much has*or has not*changed within the socio-spatial disciplines with regard to research on, about, by, or affecting women.
This section also acknowledges the many ambivalences and contradictions within feminist geography. Joos Fortujin (76Á77), in her discussion on balancing the mainstream and the marginal in geography, states that such contradictions will continue to emerge as long as feminist geographies continue to dismantle marginalisation mechanisms while simultaneously reproducing similar marginalisation processes through, for example, the domination of Anglo-American geographers and anglophonic researchers.
The 'porousness' of geography as a discipline is also highlighted in this section. Amy Trauger best illustrates this in her account of how she came to geography specifically because the subjects, methodologies, ontologies and epistemologies that are intrinsic to the discipline of geography are in themselves interdisciplinary (and truly interdisciplinary at that, always crossing and blurring the boundaries between the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities). Geography takes as given the inseparability of the natural and the cultural and, as Trauger points out, 'it is our job as geographers to observe and understand their interactions, manifestations and hybridities' (88).
The second part of Feminisms in Geography expands on these ongoing challenges to the production of feminist geographic knowledge within the discipline itself. These challenges have emerged from both within and outside the academy and demonstrate how feminist geographers are deeply embedded in the project of critiquing universalisms. At the same time they acknowledge, as Kath Browne does in her piece on power and privilege in feminist geographies, that these are often 'embattled spaces . . . [and] at times, feminist geographers have silenced internal critiques of feminist geographical practices as a strategy to ensure survival' (143).
As part of the project to challenge the latter, the editors have included reprints of two articles*in German by Anne-Francoise Gilbert and in Hindustani by the Sangtin Collective*without English translation. The editors point to their inclusion as a challenge to the 'dominance of the English language as lingua franca and as dominating the discourse for interactions' (92Á93). As such, it is an interesting (and duly frustrating) exercise. This reviewer wondered, however, whether a list of articles published in other languages with only the title translated might have served better in providing a similarly frustrating hint of the very broad range and content of intriguing geographical work being produced, which is inaccessible to those who do not speak the language.
The third section of the anthology covers feminist geographic practice/s via a range of case studies of different spaces of knowledge production. Such spaces range from the material*the home (England and Stiell), school (Kobayashi and Peake) and the academy (Vaiou)*to the discursive spaces of collaboration (Gilbert and Masucci), theory (Raghuram and Madge) and pedagogy (Oberhauser). What will be of considerable interest to feminists working outside socio-spatial disciplines is the intertwining of the personal and intellectual journeys that this section details.
Interestingly, all of the contributors are based in the Northern Hemisphere and all contributions are also situated within this context. The absence of feminist geographers and geographies working in and from the 'bottom-half' of the world is glaring, especially considering that the first article is a reprint of the influential 'On Not Excluding Half of the Human in Human Geography'. The lack of contributions from geographers such as Robyn Dowling, Ruth Fincher, Louise Johnson, Louise Johnston, Robyn Longhurst, and Robin Peace, to name only a few influential feminist geographers working in Australia and New Zealand, thus detracts from what is otherwise a useful collection. As many of the current contributions do amply demonstrate, however, there is considerable space for future reconciliation, as in geographer Liz Bondi's statement (cited in Fortuijn 81) that, above all, feminist geographies articulate a 'politics of ambivalence' that purposively creates spaces in which tensions, contradictions and paradoxes can be negotiated fruitfully and dynamically. Ida Leeson's was not an extraordinary life. It might be called remarkable for one thing only: that she was the first woman to be appointed as Mitchell Librarian, in the Public Library of New South Wales, 'in charge of the most significant collection of Australiana in the country' (x). This singular achievement does not define either the woman or the life. Yet her professional position served to generate a series of impressions and recollections that cluster about her slight, suit-coated figure, providing Sylvia Martin with*just*enough material to construct this beguiling and delicately-wrought biography.
Ida Leeson was a quiet and, almost always, a self-effacing woman. This was consistent with her work as a librarian, in a time when librarians habitually eschewed authorship or authority, defining professional accomplishment through their success in making research materials available to writers. An exemplary librarian, Leeson catalogued and classified, built up the Mitchell's collection and introduced both the curious and the serious researcher to its marvels. She almost seems to disappear into her position, taking a professional pride in her own invisibility. And so she remains, despite Martin's dedicated efforts at recovery, an enigmatic figure: 'the fragments just too few and the holes too gaping to even attempt to create a seamless whole ' (197).
The self-effacement was not, of course, purely an occupational attitude. Martin shows that at a time when some of her (few) male colleagues were becoming anxious about the cultural inscription of librarianship as a feminised profession, Leeson 'settled happily into the position of conduit and facilitator', never seeking 'personal importance' in life (200), and for the same reason never organising and preserving her own papers for posterity. Both as a woman and as a working-class girl made good, it seems, she had learned well the lesson of humility.
Only once did she speak out with fire about her abilities and consequent entitlements. In 1932, with 26 years of experience at the Public Library under her belt, Leeson was one of three female applicants for the position of Mitchell Librarian. All three outstripped the two male applicants in ability and experience. Leeson was ultimately given the position, but upon humiliating and unjust terms. One of the roles of the Mitchell Librarian had been to act as deputy to the Principal Librarian of the Public Library. Although the library trustees recommended Leeson as the most desirable candidate, the State Minister for Education objected that, as a woman, she could not deputise for the Principal Librarian: 'men prefer to deal with men' (62). The impasse was only resolved by the creation of a new position of Deputy Principal Librarian. This was given to John Metcalfe, who had been non-competitive for the position of Mitchell Librarian when compared with Leeson. Though placed on a lower salary than Leeson, he was accorded seniority over her. Leeson herself had to accept a salary considerably below that of her predecessor.
It is a piece of bureaucratic bloody-mindedness that can still cause feminist blood to boil. It produced the one surviving letter from Leeson to indicate that*however restrained her expression*her own blood was thus susceptible. She appealed to the Public Service Board against the inadequacy of her salary and the seniority granted to Metcalfe. His appointment was made, she pointed out, 'not because of any unfitness on my part . . . but because of official opposition to a woman occupying, even for a few days, such an administrative position' (64). Her appeal on both counts was unsuccessful.
The deep injustice of this decision forms, in a sense, the emotional core or pivot of Martin's biography. Yet Martin is careful to point out the dangers of making assumptions about what precisely it meant to Leeson herself. One cannot, for example, assume that she was disappointed that the position of Principal Librarian itself was closed to her. There is little evidence to suggest she would have taken either pride or pleasure in such a bureaucratic post. Nor can her successful application to be made Mitchell Librarian be seen in any uncomplicated way as a 'feminist' campaign: several of her younger female colleagues, who more comfortably owned the label, thought that Leeson was anything but a feminist.
The same elusiveness of subjective meaning hangs over the other central thread of this biography: Leeson's relationship with her long-time companion Florence Birch. Some have been swift to assume that theirs was a lesbian relationship, others just as swift to repudiate the suggestion. It would be too simple to assume that such denials stem merely from wilful blindness. As Martin delicately excavates the limits of evidence, she reminds us that the love between the two women might have been made sense of in many ways, but that we do not and can never fully know what their own particular ways were.
Despite her diligent pursuit of numerous lukewarm trails, Martin has been able to turn up little evidence to illuminate Leeson's emotional, affective subjectivity. Faced with an imperfect and for the most part frustratingly impersonal record, she has wisely stepped back from a linear narrative of the rise and fall of a life. Instead, Martin treats her subject in thematic chapters framed around specific episodes, issues or relationships, not progressive epochs in a biography. This strategy allows Martin to subject each theme to gentle but unsettling questioning, and to construct an open analysis in place of the closed certainties of narrative. It also creates, at times, unsatisfying gaps and disjunctures in the story. As it weaves back and forth through time, attentive and retentive reading is required, if the reader is to hold in her imagination the complex contours of the life, the simultaneity of events and relationships.
I wanted at times, if only for reading pleasure, a little more narrative closure, more drama, more probing of the secret places in this quiet life. I wanted, for example, more explanatory drive towards that moment in 1949 when Leeson so suddenly, and to me so inexplicably, walked away from the Mitchell Library with only one week's notice. I wanted to see, in that sudden abandonment of all that had defined her, the tendrils of suppressed resentment over her appointment. But in the end, Martin has convinced me that her restraint is more appropriate to her subject than my narrative greed. She is right not to push her material beyond its limits, right to respect her subject's privacy, and to refrain from filling silences with assumptions which, however obvious they seem to a twenty-firstcentury sensibility, might well have appalled Leeson herself. The professional classifier who defies classification preserves her elusive subjectivity in the shadows of this speculative, provocative and disarming work. Near the end of her mammoth study of Miles Franklin's life and times, Jill Roe recalls Miles' remark 'that the thought of biography added a new dimension to her fear of death' (562). Perhaps she was right to be afraid since the first two biographies of Franklin were written by contemporaries*Marjorie Barnard and Colin Roderick*for whom she had little time, though Barnard's appeared before the Franklin Papers, which include many scathing comments about her, were available. A few pages later, Roe quotes P.R. Stephensen's wonderful description of Miles as being 'as paradoxical as a platypus' (568). Hence, while she may have feared biography, she took care to preserve most of her personal papers as well as her cash, leaving the former to the Mitchell Library, and the latter to establish the Miles Franklin Award.
In her last years Franklin not only feared death but felt her life had been marked by failure. Thanks to Jill Roe's many years of immersion in the Franklin Papers, supplemented by exhaustive research elsewhere, it is not difficult to see why. One of the most surprising revelations is the sheer amount of writing done by Franklin, much of it unpublished during her lifetime. This pattern was established very early. Franklin's career as a published writer seems to have begun in 1896, when she was 16, with a report on a school picnic for the Goulburn Penny Post. There is a great deal more unpublished material from this time, including a previously unknown novel, 'Lord Dunleve's Ward', running to well over 100,000 words. This, it seems, was the early manuscript recalled by Thomas Hebblewhite, then editor of the Penny Post, who advised Miles to write about 'the things she knew best', rather than English lords and ladies. The result, of course, was My Brilliant Career.
Roe provides an excellent account of the path to publication of Franklin's now classic novel (much more tortuous than implied in the 1979 film) and its reception, clearing up earlier rumours that it was hated by Miles' family, rumours perhaps spread by Miles herself, who later in life seemed to want to play down her early success. My Brilliant Career was widely and generally positively reviewed in England as well as Australia, and also attracted much fan mail: 'an exceptional cache of some sixty letters, mostly written between September 1901 and December 1902' (73). As, indeed, it continued to do throughout Franklin's life, despite being withdrawn from print at her request in 1910 and not republished again until 10 years after her death. This was again at her request, though in the interim she often used publishers' desire for a reprint as a way of getting them to read unpublished material. Before leaving for America in April 1906, Franklin wrote a further three novels, all rejected at the time, though later published after substantial rewriting, as well as a number of short stories; she also had over 30 feature articles published in Sydney newspapers. Her success as a journalist, however, did not assuage her 'second novel' anxieties.
As earlier reviewers have noted, Stella Miles Franklin is very much an historian's biography. It is not only organised by time and place but is particularly strong in its recreation of the times and places of Franklin's life. Her 10 years in America, spent mainly in Chicago working for the National Women's Trade Union League, are vividly evoked, even down to detailed accounts of how much money she earned and how she spent it*it seems that she was always thrifty. And during these years, despite working full time, she not only read widely but kept up an amazing output of writing. In addition to the material she wrote or edited for the League, including contributions to its journal Life and Labor, Franklin produced five novels, only two of them ever published, and a number of stories. She also began writing plays, something she continued to do for the rest of her life, though with virtually no success, especially financial.
The same pattern was repeated between 1915 and 1932, years spent mainly in London, though with a couple of lengthy visits home. Again, Franklin was mostly working full time to support herself, but still managed, Roe calculates, to write 'at least seven novels or novellas and linked sequences of sketches; as many as fifteen plays; three film scenarios; and some sixteen topical pieces' (231). Again, only some of the topical pieces and one novel found publication at the time, though three of the novels were published later. Franklin was clearly determined not to be another Olive Schreiner who, as she told Mary Fullerton in 1928, had lacked self-discipline. This could never have been said of Franklin and is the key to her strongest beliefs, including some that were ahead of her time, beautifully summed up in a 1948 letter as the need for 'birth control, girth control and earth control' (466). Franklin's concern for the environment was accompanied, as Roe demonstrates, by a belief that restitution needed to be made to Indigenous Australians who had kept the land unspoilt, as a well as a fear that Australia might suffer another invasion from the north. The latter was unsurprising in 1945 and reflects the fear of 'Asian hordes' characteristic of the time. Franklin's views on sexuality, however, were formed earlier and have been the subject of much later speculation. Roe argues convincingly that Franklin lived according to 'the codes of self-restraint and sexual abstinence created by English women for their own protection in the mid to late nineteenth century' (537). She also notes that, despite her many women friends, Franklin herself believed she 'was more at ease in the company of men' (535). Certainly, in her youth she had been regarded as a flirt, and had had many wanting to marry her.
After she returned to live in Sydney late in 1932, Franklin no longer had to work as a secretary, though there was still plenty to do looking after her elderly mother and other relatives and taking care of the house and garden. Again, Roe provides wonderful detail about Miles' daily chores, as well as her exhaustive round of literary activities, especially her work for the Fellowship of Australian Writers. And, of course, she still kept writing, now with rather more success. Seven novels had been published between 1901 and 1932; five appeared between 1933 and her death in 1954, as well as a biography and a children's novel; two further novels, a critical work and a memoir were published between 1954 and 1963; My Brilliant Career finally reappeared in 1965. More recently there have been two volumes of letters and one of topical writings, edited by Jill Roe, and a selection from Franklin's diaries edited by Paul Brunton. Stella Miles Franklin may not achieved the fame and fortune she dreamed about when young but her reputation continues to grow; her work is now much better known than that of her own literary hero, Joseph Furphy. As Roe notes, this was partly her own doing, since Miles' joint bequests of papers and money have ensured 'her continuing participation in Australian life and culture' (568). Of course, papers are only paper without a sympathetic and painstaking researcher who has the skill and intelligence to select and bring together the insights they provide, as well as the selfdiscipline to keep working over many years. Jill Roe is one biographer who has proved worthy of her subject.

Department of English
University of Sydney elizabeth.webby@usyd.edu.au # 2009 Elizabeth Webby